a magazine devoted to gay literature

07/08/2017

The Sudden Invention of New Light

The Sudden Invention of New Light

There’s something in Montgomery Clift’s smile in Red River (1948), sweet and trusting, that doesn’t belong to the dollars on the barrelhead world of rancher John Wayne.

Together they cross sunrises and miles, Clift trying to love and hate like Wayne, finding out, in the middle of the cattle drive, that he loves much more, hates far

less. A predictable blind spot caused by the nearness of a bright light. I came out of the locker room after gym class, in my hurry to change, I’d left my fly open.

Ginger Gary in the bleachers frowned away from my flash of white undies. “Close the door,” he said, “we all know what you want.”

I didn’t understand at first, sitting down with a grin on my face just because he’d spoken his first words to me! Then I looked down and quickly did what he told me,

tautening my guilty lap beneath the zipper. Did I die of blushing? It’s not hard to imagine, in From Here to Eternity (1953), how Clift falls hard for the hostess who entertains the G.I.’s.

He’s the only innocent thing in the war and she’s the first mother he’s ever opened, so of course she can’t keep talking to the grunts same as before. When he plays “Taps”

for Frank Sinatra, expressive and slow like a solo bird calling from tree top to empty sky, you see what dooms and drives the search for meaning in a savage locale,

unspilled blood always reminding a body of the spilled. I liked Gary, he played baseball, was freckled and handsome in a way that seemed to solve all problems.

This was pretty much okay for I’d no problems to solve except loneliness for a brother of my persuasion

but he and I were not in the same clique of longing. When he loped down the halls past the blank stares of lockers, I felt like I

was watching a star, the way he feels in A Place in the Sun (1951), when Elizabeth Taylor folds herself like two scoops of whipped cream into the parlor where he’s shooting pool, and they’re so far apart,

different backgrounds, classes, he works her father’s factory, muscles bulging his sleeveless T-shirt ornament the assembly line, it’s all so far fetched but that’s what breaks your heart,

pains of growing up, learning what people really mean. Long story equals I don’t want to tell it. Equals I’ll never tell you. I called Gary once, years after high school.

He didn’t seem to find it strange I’d found his number in the phone book and wanted to know what, how, he was doing, as if there could be some reason for anything in my life.

He, too, had come out, but it wasn’t the same as when he was young, unformed, flannel rag of light to be renamed, boy who pointed out my exposed undies in disgust.

To me, Clift lifted his eyebrows like the sudden invention of new light. When I need to live in that.

—Justin Vicari

__________

Justin Vicari is a widely published gay poet, critic, and translator. His work has appeared in such journals as Postmodern Culture, American Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Spoon River, The Ledge, Third Coast, Oranges & Sardines, Hotel Amerika, 32 Poems, and other journals. His first collection of poems, The Professional Weepers won the Transcontinental Award.